The last of the GOP moderates

For those who support centrist, bipartisan solutions to our nation’s many serious challenges and who reject the idea that the only way to serve in Congress is to blindly follow the leader and toe the party line, the announcement that Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) is leaving the Senate is sad news indeed.

Snowe is a pro-choice GOP moderate, a vanishing breed in Congress.

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She is the kind of socially moderate, fiscally conservative Republican that I call “NPR Republicans.” Though disappearing from Congress, they are not an urban legend. There are still plenty of NPR Republicans around, especially in New England, and they are a pivotal swing voting group.

But they are being driven out of office by the GOP’s hard right turn, the influence of tea party supporters and the allegiance to the party’s religious conservative wing. It reflects how much the Republican Party has changed in just six years, that in 2006 Snowe ran unopposed in the primary, had token Democratic opposition and won with 74 percent of the vote.

She still has high statewide approval ratings and was expected to win reelection, but she would have faced a primary challenge from the right. The Bangor Daily News reported that earlier this month she was booed by audience members at a Republican caucus event in Bangor and her tea party-supported challenger and GOP activists deemed her insufficiently conservative.

In Washington she frequently had GOP party leaders, who thought she wasn’t a team player, wringing their hands over her independence and unpredictability. One national GOP consultant reacted with unbridled glee when I asked him about Snowe’s departure. “Maybe now we can get a Republican in that seat,” he said.

But Snowe never seemed to care what the backroom guys thought.

In a 40-year political career, she has never lost an election. Snowe was, at 31, the youngest Republican woman ever elected to the House in 1978. She is currently one of only five GOP women in the Senate.

She didn’t hesitate to criticize the sorry state of Congress in her departure announcement.

“An atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies has become pervasive in campaigns and in our governing institutions,” she said Tuesday.

Referring to her Greek heritage, Snowe said, “With my Spartan ancestry I am a fighter at heart; and I am well prepared for the electoral battle, so that is not the issue. However, what I have had to consider is how productive an additional term would be. Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term.”